1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for a memory switching data processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (‘EDVAC’) of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas of computer technology that has seen considerable advancement is the ability of designers and manufacturers to aggregate more and more computer power and resources into smaller and smaller form factors. As a result, the available board space and thermal capabilities in tight form factors such as, for example, blade servers, are becoming limited. In the standard two-socket implementation using computer processors or ‘CPUs’ with integral memory controllers, the available space for system memory is split between the processors. A processor may be able to support more modules of memory than the available space or thermal density will allow. If only one CPU is installed in the system, it is limited to one-half of the memory capacity it could use. The known solutions, inflexible and expensive, are to design another blade server for single CPU applications, or design a two-piece blade, with single and dual CPU versions of the processor complex.